Spatula City / Left Turn Only websites going offline temporarily

[intvnut]

Spatula City, which also hosts Left Turn Only, is going offline temporarily. I'm finally relocating the Left Turn Only World Headquarters from Texas to California, to rejoin with the recently-relocated Left Turn Only Western Manufacturing Facility.

 

This also means that any incoming orders for LTO Flash! will be delayed slightly. In fact, there are some outstanding orders right now that will go out tomorrow that were delayed by the Western Manufacturing Facility's recent relocation.

 

Hopefully, I will be able to find a temporary hosting solution for the site to minimize downtime. In the worst case, it will be offline for about a week. Yeah, I'm one of those lame folks that self hosts, which works out fine until you need to move everything. One of these days I'll feel comfortable taking the plunge and move to a hosting provider. Today is not that day.

Edited October 11, 2016 by intvnut

[jaybird3rd]

I wish I had the option of self-hosting, but in my area, my choice of Internet services is limited to satellite and residential DSL, neither of which is suitable for hosting. If you decide to switch to a hosting provider, I can highly recommend pair Networks; they've been very reliable in the ten years or so that I've been using them, and they offer very good site management tools.

 

Best of luck with the move!

[First Spear]

At the risk of sounding like I am "talking my book", Azure websites are *it*. Platform as a Service, make some GUI clicks and you're done. The free time you can get by having a cloud provider run your site platform instead of doing it yourself (or having a simple hosted do it) is huge. Auto scale and worldwide geographic redundancy for the same price as not having it is worth it IMHO.

[+SoulBuster]

I have had hosted sites and I have hosted my own sites before and currently self hosting. I have to say there are perks for having it hosted. But hosting it myself costs me nothing, the only thing I purchased was an SSL certificate. I would have had to buy that either way. The server it is on would be running anyway as it hosts my Plex server also. Software I am using had no cost.

 

I have 2 hours of battery backup and the last time the electricity went out in the neighborhood, my website stayed up. Apparently cable internet stills runs when the neighborhood electricity is out.

 

Having it local makes updates a snap and direct SQL manipulation a breeze.

[freewheel]

And this is why I make offline backups of all reference documentation. Except the PSG guide... Good thing I'm not actively doing much of anything this week, but I'll be sure to wget when it's back up

[First Spear]

I run a site for the local Cub Scout pack, Azure websites free tier in the App Service. Costs zero $ to run.

I run a site for the local Boy Scout troop, Azure websites basic tier in the App Service. Costs $9.67/month to run.

Both are MySQL Mercury and Wordpress, both free.

 

The power can go off indefinitely in my house, the worldwide fabric in the cloud would be unaffected indefinitely.

 

Updates can be done in a snap via FTP or Github, with several ways to rollback any site-killing change you might make.

 

Running websites has basically become a rich man's game. The big boys (Microsoft, Amazon, Google) have spent billions making this stuff a straight commodity. If you're not serving web via one of them, you're exposing yourself or costing yourself time to do a commodity task when you could be using your time for something more valuable.

 

From a selfish standpoint, I would much rather see you guys that contribute to the Inty community as geniuses spend your time actually doing Inty stuff than spending time on "hosting work".

 

All analogies break down eventually, but try this one - spending energy on doing web apps yourself is like going to get your drinking water from a stream in the back of your house every time you take a drink instead of turning the faucet in your kitchen. This stuff is a utility now.

 

Alright, I have taken this kind of OT. I will now stop.

 

 

I have had hosted sites and I have hosted my own sites before and currently self hosting. I have to say there are perks for having it hosted. But hosting it myself costs me nothing, the only thing I purchased was an SSL certificate. I would have had to buy that either way. The server it is on would be running anyway as it hosts my Plex server also. Software I am using had no cost.

 

I have 2 hours of battery backup and the last time the electricity went out in the neighborhood, my website stayed up. Apparently cable internet stills runs when the neighborhood electricity is out.

 

Having it local makes updates a snap and direct SQL manipulation a breeze.

[+SoulBuster]

My website is all automated regarding backups. Initial set up took at max 20 minutes.

 

I update to the latest version of the "store" every 2 versions (once every 2 years?) and it is free. I do not modify it myself, so no time there.

 

OS gets updated once a month.

 

All maintenance takes about half hour each month max.

 

It runs on hardware that would be running anyway, no cost there.

 

Runs on battery for 2 hours when electricity is out. Never had it shut down yet due to this. It was still online last electrical outage, so the cable company stays online even when electricity is out.

 

So I do not see the need to move to large company hosting.

 

You mentioned WordPress. It is used at work. When website design was moved from me to a marketing company, it is what they used. I think it is the worst environment to build a website in. My company has finally seen the light after a few years and are moving to a new marketing company and hosting. A large hosting company as you had suggested will work well for my company.

[+intvsteve]

Isn't Wordpress also a security bugfarm? These days, it seems most of the "visitors" to my site are 1337 h4xxorz trying to attack Wordpress.

[freewheel]

Wordpress is awesome for lazy bums like me who want the least amount of dynamic content possible, so you can close down the security holes pretty easily. Because yeah, it's full of them. Even a basic site ends up with a dozen plugins that need constant updates as the maintainers play whack-a-mole with them.

 

It's great for a basic static site with a bit of text and a few pictures, for those of us that aren't great at layouts. But holy crap, the stuff I see in my logs trying to hack it... lol.

[+Lathe26]

Ditto.

[First Spear]

With a 6502 now in the cloud, could a CP1610 be next?!

 

http://www.6502cloud.com/examples.html